Was your wedding as memorable as mine? Would you like to preserve every moment of it and share your joy with others? Present your photos in a photo book! It will serve as a beautiful keepsake for you and a delightful thank-you present for your loved ones.
Your wedding photos
Wedding photos are viewed much more often than the wedding video. That is why it is worth picking an excellent photographer. Ours was truly incredible. Bartosz Gawlik took beautiful pictures of us during wedding preparations, the church ceremony, the reception party and the open air session. We were particularly fond of these last photos taken according to our wishes on a tennis court, on railway tracks and at the seaside. I encourage you to take your photos in an unusual place or bring some gadgets to the wedding session that will be unique to you. Don’t worry: a good photographer will be able to work miracles with the weirdest of places and seemingly mundane objects (such as an old globe, table-tennis bats or huge backpacks).
Apart from perfectly framed, top-quality photos from Bartosz, we have also received tons of pictures from our guests, who stayed at the reception longer than our photographer and partied with us also on the next day. Despite their imperfections, these pictures are also a valuable keepsake.
Why should you display your photos in a photo book?
When I watched the wedding photos of other couples, I often had the feeling that the husband and wife weren’t satisfied with their presentation. Some photographers offer to make a photo album for the newlyweds. It is a good solution for busy couples, yet they need to take some inconveniences into account. Firstly, such albums often have just one huge photo per page. Secondly, the choices of the photographer are not always in line with the choices of the newlyweds. After all, how can he know what is important to you: which auntie practically raised you up, and which was invited only out of politeness? Or a different issue: sometimes the groom has a bald spot, and the bride a wry smile that nobody else notices. When making a choice between two almost identical photos, the photographer will pick the one that is better framed, yet the newlyweds would probably choose the one without those irritating imperfections.
For these reasons, I decided to create our wedding album on my own. I am a traditionalist: believe it or not, but I still habitually develop my digital photos and caption them in paper albums! That is why at first I thought that I would use a photo book designer just to determine the number and size of photos I should develop. Frankly speaking, it was the price that deterred me from photo books. Nevertheless, once I started designing, I couldn’t stop! And when I finished, it turned out that the price was not as inordinate as I had thought.
Your photos in an album and in a photo book – cost comparison
My project comprised 394 pictures. Developing each of them in 10×15 format, even at the lowest price possible, would cost me almost half of the photo book’s price. Obviously, it is highly unlikely that I would want to have them all the same size. No doubt, some of them would look much nicer enlarged, and there are rarely good deals on that. Developing 50 photos in a non-standard size would cost me at least 20% of the photo book’s price. Furthermore, I would have to buy an album. My wedding photo book has 82 pages, a hard cover and 29 x 29 cm. Similar paper albums cost from 30% to 80% of the photo book’s price. Having summed up the costs, I found out that pasting your photos in a traditional photo album costs the same or more, so I decided to be modern instead, and haven’t regretted it even once.
Advantages of presenting your photos in a photo book
Apart from the already mentioned advantages (the fact that you may determine which of your photos you will use and how), a photo book has several other advantages.
(1) What appealed to me most were its functionalities.
When you put your photos in a photo book, you may use:
— layouts – which help to distribute your photos neatly on a page. The layouts determine the size and shape of photos, which allows you to frame them differently (this is particularly convenient in the case of your photos taken by random wedding guests);
– masks – which can cover a part of your photo to give it a different shape. Your previously rectangular photos may now be oval, heart- or letter-shaped, have jagged or blurred borders, etc.;
– frames and shadows – use them if you want your photos to stand out from the background or have a 3D look;
– backgrounds – which may be not only in all imaginable colours but also with texture, e.g. you may choose bubbling waves as the background for a seaside photo shoot. Setting your photo as the background is also an interesting option. Use it when you have a picture with a beautiful landscape, and people taking little space. I did so with a photo on a tennis court. Would it be possible to do a similar thing if your photos were developed in a traditional way? I doubt it – photos pasted on other photos would hardly look aesthetic;
– texts – the choice of fonts, colours and sizes is practically unlimited;
– ClipArt images – in my wedding photo book, I didn’t use many of them – after all our photos were the most important. However, I put an elegant shadow image on the back cover of our book.
Above and below I present the same photos: on one side in original sizes, squeezed on an ordinary white page of a traditional album, and on the opposite side displayed in a photo book – with nice backgrounds, shadows, neat layouts and reframed (compare the photo of me with wild flowers and a random man in the background taken by my grandpa).
(2) Furthermore, a photo book allows you to frequently change your mind.
If you are a visual artist or have some DIY skills, you could probably cut, draw, write and colour everything on your own. Nevertheless, when you develop a photo of a certain size, clip it or paste it in one place, you make a final decision. In a photo book, on the other hand, you may change each part of your design any number of times before you place your order!
(3) The workload is another important advantage of a photo book.
Don’t ask how long it took me to design my first photo book when I still learned it, and my decrepit 8-year-old laptop struggled to process all the images. My only consolation was that labouring over a paper album with glue and scissors would also take me weeks on end. Fortunately, when I decided to give albums to our loved ones, I didn’t have to begin from the scratch. One click, and another amazing photo book with your photos is sent to the printers!
(4) The last advantage is only appreciated after some time: when people view your photos in a photo book, they don’t leave fingerprints!
A wedding photo album is one of the most frequently watched albums in your collection. In the first months after the wedding, all guests will be eager to have a look. I imagine that after a year traditional albums are all covered with fingerprints on photos and margins. Our photo book, on the other hand, is still as good as new!
Is there any advantage I forgot to mention? If you have already designed a photo book with your photos or have any questions, leave a comment! I will be happy to read about your experiences or answer your inquiries.
My advice:
– I have mentioned the high price of photo books. If you’re not in a hurry, wait patiently for a special offer. Usually, a month is enough to find a discount code which may decrease the price by up to 20%! Here is an overview of photo-book-making sites with prices applicable in 2015: http://www.cnet.com/news/best-and-worst-photo-book-making-websites-for-you/
– Before you start designing, group your photos in folders that will represent the ‘chapters’ of your photo book. This will greatly facilitate and speed up the designing process.
– If you set your own photo as a background, apply frames or shadows to the other pictures, so that they stand out.
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